It’s A Male Thing
“Those are mushrooms,” my wife explained to our inquisitive three-year-old
son. The decorative accents were found
throughout our kitchen at the time. “That
is the stalk and that is the cap,” she continued as his eyes wondered from the
canister set to the hand towels to the magnets on the refrigerator door.
“These are mushrooms, too,” my wife clarified as she pointed
to the colorful mushrooms on the pot holder hanging over the oven door handle.
You could plainly see his wheels turning and that all-too-familiar
arrangement of his brow on his forehead told me that his inquiry into this
topic might not be over.
Sure enough, an evening or two later his brow revealed the
same position – this time as he was taking his bath. Imagine how cute it seemed to his mom as he
proclaimed that his “pee-pee looked like a mushroom.” Still not able yet to pronounce his r’s, his announcement
sounded more like, “Look, I have a mushwoom pee-pee.”
There was, and still is, no one in the entire world better
at dropping a subject and praying it never comes up again than my wife. Her skills in this area are world-renowned. Her mother practiced it, and so did her grandmother
and many others before her. Like a genetic trait, it has become embedded in their
DNA and part of their feminine way of life for centuries.
For men, however, we fathers disagree somewhat as to how to
handle these situations. We are willing
to prolong the conversation just long enough to explain to our kids that this
topic shouldn’t be discussed again with anyone except Mommy or Daddy. Yes, we’ll chuckle a few dozen times and
repeat the story to our buddies for years, but we won’t skip that
ever-important step to tell the kids what should be repeated and what
shouldn’t. In other words, we do not
practice what we preach.
Well, I wasn’t around for the bathroom exposé, so I had no
reason to bring up the matter again. And
I knew better than to risk contradicting the different styles of child rearing
between parents, especially in the presence of the kids. So, I also let it drop. It is possible, though, in hindsight that my
wife wishes we wouldn’t have.
A few nights later, my daughters scheduled a sleepover on a
Friday night. They invited not only their friends but suggested they all bring along
their Cabbage Patch dolls (a huge, hot item at the time). My wife met the girls’ classmates at a local
high school basketball game and when it ended she drove the group back to our
home. The Chevy Blazer was full of young
girls except for our three-year-old son.
I can only guess that he had heard more than enough about
those Cabbage Patch dolls for the two hours he sat in the bleachers with that
crew. Then, more doll talk on the way
home was more than he could tolerate. Not missing his chance to finally
overshadow the gals, he loudly blurted out one of the more memorable lines ever
proclaimed by anyone in our household.
“Hey, gorwls, I have a mushwoom pee-pee!”
And that ended the Cabbage Patch doll dialogue with the
girls for good. I will admit, though, that
I have repeated this story a time or two. Then again, I’m a male.
